AGE OF IRON
J.M Coetzee
Random House, New York, September 1990
192 pp., $ 18.95
There are a handful of happy countries in the world, countries without histories, where writers confine their art to quiet accounts of family business, bucolic joys, and civic satisfactions. And then there are countries like South Africa, where there is too much history, too many legacies form the past, and too many debts to pass on the future.
For writers in these places such a heavy responsibility is a mixed blessing. While such writers can easily gain the world's attention and frequently earn an international reputation, they are also aware that they must bear witness to their extraordinary times and peoples, and write only about that which makes their country currently unique. Under a sentence, of sorts, for the duration, they cannot indulge themselves.
For South African writers that has meant writing exhaustively, and almost exclusively, about apartheid. The list of those who have taken on this task is long and distinguished. It includes among others, Alan Paton, Athol Fugard Andre Brink, Christopher Hope, Nadine Gordimer, and J.M. Coetzee. Their books have not only made apartheid a household word but have also conveyed in vivid and moving narratives the sufferings and tragedies caused by apartheid. They have put faces to the consequences of government policies, fleshed out the cruel apartheid laws with human lives, and some, like Alan Paton have given us phrases that continue to resonate. Phrases such as "the beloved country," and the even more poignant - and never more appropriate than at the present: "I have one great fear in my heart that one day when they turn to loving they will find we are turned to hating."
But as apartheid lies dying and a new dispensation, democratic and nonracial, awaits to be born, the survival of some of these works will come into question. Some may even be considered irrelevant. Already new writers are in the wings, black writer who will reflect African experiences and African interpretations, not European ones. For the writers just listed are all still shaped by a classic Anglo-European tradition. And despite their African setting, and their identification with the continent, they remain nonetheless alien and deracinated separated from African experiences ways of thinking and rhythms of language.
A writer like Alan Paton will permanently join the canon, for like Uncle Tom's Cabin and One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich, his Cry, the Beloved Country is one of those seminal books that firmly fix a place and a condition in the public mind. It is even forty years after it is publication still the most moving and insightful book about race and South Africa.
But there is less certainly about the others. As intelligent and cool as Gordimer's accounts of apartheid in South Africa have been, they are very much rooted in a set of unique and finite circumstances. Gordimer's books may well run the risk of becoming literary footnotes in history rather than guidebooks to the human heart. On the other hand, a writer like Coetzee, particularly in novels like The Life and Times of Michael K, From the Heart of the Country, and Waiting for the Barbarians,
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